On 19/11/11 10:43, Daniel Friesen wrote: > I had an idea for a feature to allow any language user to go to any other > language wiki and be able to use the namespaces they recognize. > > The idea would be that a user from it.wp could go to fr.wp and when > visiting Utente:... (Utente is User in Italian) whether via search or > direct address linking and end up on Utilisateur:... (French's User > namespace) > > This would be done by considering every possible localization of a > namespace as an alias in all languages. So on fr.wp Utente, User, etc... > would all be aliases for Utilisateur. Additionally since namespaces are > dependent on the user rather than the content for logged in users we could > start displaying localized namespace names to help the user around and not > have to worry about issues that if they copy&paste or whatever it wouldn't > be valid. > > > We've got a massive localization cache, and it's possible we might find a > way to make a feature like this possible, so that wasn't an issue to stop > this idea. But there was a slim possibility that words used for namespaces > might conflict with what other languages use. That sounded so unlikely > that I wrote a script to scan every language we have for all available > namespace names and what they map to and see if the same text is used for > different namespaces in any languages. > > And the dooming news, there are some conflicts. > > "Stampa" is NS_TEMPLATE in Aln (Gheg Albanian) and Sq (Albanian) and > NS_FILE in Mt (Maltese). And Datoteka is NS_FILE in Bs (Bosnian), Hr > (Croatian), and Sh (Serbocroatian), but NS_MEDIA in Sl (Slovenian).
It's not only about possible conflicts among the namespace names themselves, but also with articles. Suppose that there was a language where America meant template. That would make all the pages at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/America: either unreachable, or stored at the template namespace. OTOH, it's simple to do such redirects with a javascript (which you could configure for your language). Also, English is always available as an alias, so they always work (you need to be familiar with their names, though). _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
